After building two Nexus phones together, Google and LG are fairly close when it comes to sharing information. Today it’s been announced that the two companies have entered a long-term global patent licensing agreement.
The deal is for cross-licensing which gives the two companies access to utilise existing patents from each other, as well as those filed over the next ten years. The agreement is at this stage without a public announcement of services that will be initially utilised. We could see an announcement come further down the track though, such as when Samsung and Google entered a similar agreement, the fruit of which was seen at Google I/O when KNOX functionality was announced as coming to Android.
This agreement would of course give Google access to the WebOS technology which LG purchased from HP, initially to power TVs. Google’s Vice President of design, Matias Duarte worked on WebOS at Palm, and you can bet he’ll be pleased to have access to some of those ideas again.
We’ll watch with interest what comes of this relationship, perhaps we’ll see KnockCode on the next version of Android as an extension of Knox?
What LG functions would you see as a good match for integrating into stock Android?
